Sharing Life's Lessons on Living in this World and yet being Above it!

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Disclaimer 1: The author, AVIS, does not claim that he is the be-all, know-all and end-all of all that he shares based on experiences and learnings. AVIS has nothing against or for any religion. If the reader has a learning to share, most welcome. If the reader has a bone to pick or presents a view, which may affect the sentiments of other followers/readers, then this Page’s administrators may have to regrettably delete such a comment and even block such a follower. Disclaimer 2: No Thought expressed here is original though the experience of the learning shared may be unique. AVIS has little interest in either infringing upon or claiming copyright of any material published on this Page. The images/videos used on this Page/Post are purely for illustrative purposes. They belong to their original owners/creators. The author does not intend profiting from them nor is there any covert claim to copyright any of them.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Living with worry, fear, guilt, anger and more…

Many of us hope, through techniques and
methods, to get rid of debilitating emotions like fear, worry, guilt or anger.
But the truth is you can’t ever rid yourself of worry or fear or guilt or
anger. You can only__and have to__learn to live with them. By learning to not
give them any attention, you make them powerless. When they don’t rule your
thinking, your mind adapts to your native state of peace, love, abundance and joy!

There are two states in which we naturally operate.
Sub-conscious Doing and Conscious Doing. Intelligent living lies in making the
important shift to Conscious Doing.

Let’s take the example of driving a car on a
highway. There are so many things you are doing. And most of them are being
done sub-consciously. You are driving, of course. But you are also having a
conversation with someone riding with you. As you are doing this you are
changing gears, switching your feet between the pedals on the footboard and keeping
a sharp watch on the road ahead. This kind of doing is Sub-conscious Doing. It
also comes from practice – when you are habituated to doing something.

Take another example of driving the same car
through a very bad traffic jam. You are doing the same things with the highest
level of focus and intense vigilance. This is Conscious Doing.

When we worry or fear an outcome or grieve over something we are often actually doing
it sub-consciously. Think about it carefully and you will agree with me. Which
is, we don’t even know we are worrying, but because we are worrying we are not
present in the moment. Long periods of time in a day are spent by many of us being
absent from the present. You are, for instance, in a meeting at work. It is
closer to 3 PM. And you are actually worrying if your kids got home and ate
their meal because you have not got an SMS yet from your older one. You are
worried how your younger one, who went to school with an upset tummy, is now
feeling. A colleague shoots a question at you and you snap out of your worry-filled
reverie and quickly struggle to get back into the meeting. Worrying cannot be
eradicated entirely. But you can choose to shift from such sub-conscious worrying
to, let us say, conscious worrying. Which is, by shifting from not knowing you
are worrying to knowing exactly why you are worrying and knowing how to not
feed your worry any attention anymore! You make this shift by increasing your
level of awareness. And that comes from practicing, diligently, daily, not to
give certain, especially those debilitating foursome, emotions too much
attention. The secret lies in choosing what you want your mind to attend to.

So, if you choose being calm consciously,
you avoid sub-conscious worrying. And even if you must worry__let us say over
the health of a loved one__you do that from a positive, productive perspective.
Your worry then leads to constructive action and not to debilitating grief or
sorrow. Through repeated practice, and through consciously, consistently,
choosing to be calm, you become your state of being __ you are then aglow with
the Universal Energy.

The Buddha was asked this question: Why do the noble beings who have
developed their minds appear so calm and radiant? The Buddha replied:

‘They
sorrow not for what is past,
They yearn not after that which is not come,
The present is sufficient for them:
Hence it is they appear so radiant.
By having longing for the future,
By sorrowing over what is past,
By this fools are withered up
As a cut-down tender reed.’

Indeed. It is not as if the calmer folks you
see around you have nothing to worry about or fear or get angry over. Anyone
will get angry if there is a provocation. Anyone will fear a consequence which
one has not experienced. Anyone will carry the guilt of a mistake. And anyone
will have to face worries that surface in the mind. Because all of these
emotions are led by thoughts. And thoughts are like waves. They keep
ceaselessly, untiringly, lashing on the mind’s shore. By training the mind to
only do things consciously__including thinking__we have an opportunity to live freely,
fully, without fear, anger, guilt, worry and more bothering us. Without any of
them taking us away from living in the moment!